Mobile phone thefts at festivals

Request Number: FOI/16790

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Crime Statistics

Subject: Mobile phone thefts at festivals

Request and Answer:
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:

ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Request
Request regarding mobile phone thefts at festivals within your jurisdiction. 

Request 1
The number of reported mobile phone thefts at each festival in your area for the years:
a) 2025
b) 2024
c) 2023

Request 2
The number of total thefts, not limited to mobile devices, at each festival in your area for the years:
a) 2025
b) 2024
c) 2023

Request 3
If available, please also provide:
a) The number of stolen phones that were later recovered or found for each year from each Festival
b) A breakdown of the models of stolen phones (if this information is recorded) for each year from each festival.

If possible, I would appreciate it if the data could be provided in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format (.xlsx or .csv).
*Please note, Festival in this context refers to any music, food or drink festivals, harvest festivals, flower festivals, horse racing festivals, festivals of transport, etc organised within the area throughout the year 

Answer
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;

(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;

(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and

(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be:

• made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
• made for the same or similar information; and
• received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

To identify the thefts of mobile phones and total thefts in general, at festivals, would require a manual examination of records between years 2023 and 2025. Limiting our searches to all recorded offences where property was described as ‘Mobile phones & accessories’ and were classified as stolen, returned 1,700 relevant offences. It has been estimated that it would take approximately 200 hours to manually review these records to establish which offences occurred at a festival. Additionally, during the same period there were around 60,000 theft offences. To manually examine these records to determine if these offences happened at a festival, has been estimated to take approximately 7,500 hours.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. 

Unfortunately we are unable to offer refinement for this request.